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Thursday, September 20, 2007

Dissatisfaction?

According to researchers Frank Lutz and Laurence Iannaccone, the
Dissatisfaction Theory of American Democracy says simply that when
voters are dissatisfied, they get out and vote to change whatever it is
they are dissatisfied with.

Dissatisfaction theory plays out dramatically in school board elections.
Unhappy voters have been shown to turn out in larger than usual numbers
to get rid of board incumbents when their constituents don't like
something happening with the schools. The newly elected board members,
in turn, fire the superintendent, hire a new one, and make policy
changes.

Conversely, the low voter turn out in many school board elections
-sometimes as low as 15 percent -- can be seen to reflect voter
satisfaction with the way schools are going. But before you think
BoardBuzz is suggesting a "keep out the vote" campaign, remember that
low turnout can also be a sign that the community flat out doesn't care,
which is never a good thing, especially for school leaders attempting to
do more for their students.

Related to this, the Lighthouse Project, IASB's own groundbreaking
research of school board effectiveness, shows that acceptance of the
status quo is a characteristic of low-achieving districts along with a
tendency to attribute students' low performance to factors outside of
school. School boards of high-performing districts, on the other
hand,are more likely to express confidence in their students' ability to
achieve and their professional staff's capacity to make it happen. They
also put their beliefs to work by creating conditions that support
school improvement.

Perhaps what our schools really need from their communities is a bit of
constructive dissatisfaction -- communities that are never quite
satisfied with "good enough" and support their schools' ongoing efforts
to do even better.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

September 10 Work Session Notes

Notes From September 10, 2007 Work Session

  1. Board heard a presentation from Ebenezer Principal Tanya Campbell (and staff) about programs helping students to achieve
  2. Board heard a presentation about the intersection of Firetower Road and Porter Road. There was concern expressed about growth in the area with the new elementary school making the intersection obsolete. The Board Chair was asked to request the York County Council review this intersection again in light of the new elementary school opening up.
  3. After first stating his preference was to get the fund balance up to proper levels (2 months expenses), John Hair recommended the balance surplus from 2006-07 be spent as follows; $750,000 for security systems; $350,000 for Professional Development for all personnel; and $1,000,000 for artificial turf and scoreboard for District Three Stadium. Principal James Blake and Athletic Director Billy Parker spoke in favor of the proposal. Stated benefits; graduation in the stadium; soccer in the stadium; more band competition in the stadium; gray Y football in the stadium; Shrine Bowl in the stadium. John Hair reported the football field savings would pay for the new turf if you factored in the stadium field was worn out (due to age and not improper maintenance by the district) and would have to be replaced at a cost of $400,000. The scoreboard would pay for itself through advertising of up to $125,000 per year. Hair was asked for a copy of the calculations showing the savings. There was no explanation on how the field wore out after the district built another district stadium, which should have reduced the wear on one field.
  4. The Board was presented a map showing proposed reassignment changes
  5. A Brief review of PACT data was presented (no real changes from previous year)
  6. A review of the adequate facilities ordinance was made with the recommendation this was turning out to be an intrusion into school district capital programs
  7. A school Climate Report was given. Key highlights were:

In school suspensions decreased from 2459 to 2173

Expulsions decreased from 339 to 273

Arrests decreased from 144 to 81

Dropouts increased from 191 to 416

58 High School and 88 Middle School students had criminal incidents

Student figures so far this year are:

School

% In Senior Class

Anticipated Graduation Rate

Number of Students

Northwestern

17.8%

71.2%

1,763

Rock Hill

17.4%

69.6%

2,171

South Pointe

15.9%

63.5%

1,399

District

17.1%

68.6%

5,333

District Three Second Graders Talk About School Board Trustees

What is a board member?

Kindergarten

A person, a teacher, a man, a dentist, a man who writes on the board, teaches and gives grades to students, a girl who plays in the snow, picks up dirt at the park, swings on a swing, brings chalk boards to school, looks at papers, writes about families, teaches us not to fight, joins members to a group of people that died, buys boards, builds stuff, help you learn, helps with the date and month of the year, counts kids, plays volleyball, says the ABC’s right, tells teachers what to do, play with people if they are bored, build schools, build buildings for teachers, take care of children, look and see what teachers do, help teachers clean up, watch out for mean people, save teachers from bad people, write on boards, play with nice people, tell teachers not to be mean to kids, member of a board, put members on the board, fix our boards, write something down so they won’t forget it, come to school and write down stuff, see if the school is clean’

First Grade

What you write on, person who makes boards, a cop, scientist, a helper, a special person, a person or a book, makes toys and books, they surf, shaped like a square, who gets put on the wall, an employee, someone who helps to put the boards up, helps people just like a mother and does other stuff, person who reads, puts on a show, has lots of meetings, gives the school money, tells funny jokes, helps us learn about shapes, come to school and look at the board, is a school, a girl on a board, caretaker of boards, is a calendar, helps in the office, is a boy, a man that can tell the board what to do.

Second Grade

Help us read and write, look in at teachers to be sure they are doing right, set up different kinds of cameras so kids do not know they are being watched, go to meetings all day long, make rules for safety of the schools to make sure all the kids in the school are safe, talk on the phone all day, make sure kids are doing their job, watch over us with security cameras, just a friend, check on the teachers and principal to be sure everything is OK, write a lot of papers, must be a very hard job and a lot of work, they don’t get much sleep, it’s so hard an encyclopedia can’t do it, they are VIP’s, hardest job in the world, make sure Principals are doing their job, give us food, write science experiments for us, fixes lights, brings us tissue when our nose is running, brings us toilets – we need taller toilets, a friend, need bigger toilets, make boys and girls be nice, kind people, bring new books, bring bigger desks – they are too short, helps in the recovery room, sends reports to the state, makes laws and makes them fair, in a surfboard club and competes with other surfers, makes surfboards, get jobs for people, cover boards, play with boards,

Third Grade

Pays the bill for the schools, another helping hand, call people to get things fixed, put automatic spray in restrooms cause sometimes it doesn’t smell too good, they need to fix the toilets – not big enough – and paint the restroom walls, does the boards out in the hall, make plans for teachers, over the District and tell people at front desk what to do, boss of everything like the school and the store or the state, help fix boards, someone tall so teachers won’t have to stand on chairs, picks the healthy things for us to eat, works in the District Office, cleans floors, cleans up the school, servant of the people, guard the school, says what to do and when to do it, cooks the food for the school, boss the Principals around, helps teachers put up boards, clean up school at end of year, makes rules for school like governor makes rules for state,

Fourth Grade

Do fun stuff, is a helper, sees how kids are doing in school, tells teachers and Principals what to do, has meetings with teachers and principals, tells the Principal what to say in the morning, boss of all the schools and teachers and principals, makes things for schools, over the staff at the school, handles problems that need to be solved, the principals big big boss, make payement on school software, make decisions on how to make students healthy, our principal is the best board member ever, is why our school is so neat, they own the teachers, own the schools, come to the board and write down missing letters for you to listen and learn, a nice considerate person, help out at the office, helps raise money for the school, person who taxes people, writes down on a board when and what the school should do for the rest of the week, help teachers clean up the classroom, works in church that is really called a board tee, once a board member always a board member, looks at bulletin boards, is always bored and doesn’t have anything to do so they join a club where you can go to schools, bored members go in classrooms and help the teachers teach stuff, ride on trains and shout “all aboard”, if something breaks – they fix it, work on a ship – they load and say “all aboard”, make things out of boards, make boards for houses; shelves; and boards for bill boards, they cut down trees and make things out of wood, they name schools, come to look at classes, people who jump off buildings with no parachute, they like to play board games, run over people with 18 wheelers, jump in fish bowls with piranhas, captain of a ship, mop the deck, put out food, helps us with our work, they are skate boarders, people who decorate boards at their schools – if they do good – it will be hung in the hall of fame for board members

Fifth Grade

Makes sure your school doesn’t have asbestos and your teachers are teaching what you need to know, they do the board outside, cleans rooms at school, kind of like a janitor, listens very well, someone who follows direction well, is always on time and does their very best, an assistant from the school district, give teachers advice, help us put our school board up, help pick teachers and principals, the principals head boss, if they find a kid with a weapon they get contacted and they will get them kicked out of school, help schools win awards, keep school clean and make sure we have certified teachers, help the President build schools, also known as Board of Trustees, make big decisions like where to put schools and snow days and make-up days, works on all boards at school, helps with plays and in the cafeteria, they put banners up on the walls, helps the school out with rude gestures and bad attitudes and with gardening, they make after school programs for kids, they pay teachers, they make neat designs for school boards, they make up the recess games out side or make up the dance moves, they put good restrictions for all school in the district, help with valentines dances, they decide what school a child will go to, they collect the PACT and put it into the machine, controls all the teachers – even the principal, gives good advice, they are the principals principal, they are elected, they serve without pay, they make all the important decisions for the school, they make schools non-smoking (Yeah!), they say nice things to students, they see how much you know, it’s not a full time job – they work at other places

Gifted and Talented

Work for a little bit of money, enjoy working with children, must be good at math and science to work on budgets, good job on limiting the budget for the teachers, my Mom’s a teacher – thanks for giving my Mom rules (and many other teachers as well), responsible people, must be like politicians, schedule must be wild and crazy, help boards work

Reassignment Numbers

School

Anticipated Enrollment before next reassignment

Free & Reduced Lunch

Low PACT Numbers

Northwestern

1761

41.4%

45.4%

Rock Hill

1778

43.5%

45.6%

South Pointe

1648

41.8%

49.4%

Dutchman Creek

848

36.7%

39.3%

Sullivan

837

44.5%

45.1%

Rawlinson Road

857

40.3%

46.7%

Castle Heights

819

46.7%

49.8%

Saluda Trail

793

43.3%

53.0%

India Hook

596

30.5%

28.2%

York Road

544

31.8%

37.3%

Mt. Gallant

550

36.2%

39.2%

Ebinport

541

38.2%

40.6%

Richmond Drive

555

40.0%

43.3%

Mt. Holly

562

35.6%

43.5%

Old Pointe

608

36.4%

44.0%

Lesslie

519

37.7%

45.3%

Finley Road

503

35.3%

47.1%

Rosewood

622

47.7%

48.7%

Independence

487

54.1%

52.6%

Northside

378

55.9%

53.8%

Ebenezer

338

55.5%

54.6%

Sunset Park

324

45.7%

55.9%

Belleview

454

53.1%

56.7%

Oakdale

554

52.0%

58.7%

Sylvia Circle

298

69.0%

79.4%

Blue = affected by Old Pointe overcapacity issues

Red = Changed to accommodate Mt. Holly

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Get New Student Assignment Maps

http://www.rock-hill.k12.sc.us/info.cfm?subjectId=2&topicId=520

Merit Pay For Teachers?

Merit Pay: For Love and Money

As veteran educators retire and good young teachers drop out, incentive pay may be the answer to making the center hold.

by Roberta Furger

published 9/1/2007

What's Next: For Love and Money

Credit: Rob Colvin/Getty Images

PREDICTION: Merit pay and other new approaches will be seen as the best answer to getting and retaining gifted teachers.

This is a multipart article. Click here to go to the beginning.

In the world of K-12 education, incentive pay for teachers -- programs that reward good teaching and encourage the most effective educators to share their talents with the highest-need students -- have become the reform du jour.

Since last year, the U.S. Department of Education has awarded nearly $75 million in grants to schools and school districts interested in developing systems that reward good teaching and compensate teachers for taking jobs in hard-to-staff schools (low-performing and typically high-poverty schools). Districts from California to Texas to North Carolina are tapping into these new funds to address two of the thorniest issues in education today: how to develop fair and accurate ways to measure effective teaching, and how to find sustainable strategies to balance the distribution of experienced teachers, who now tend to be disproportionately represented in high-performing (and typically more affluent) schools.

Few people argue with the underlying principles fueling the growing interest in incentive plans. Just as we assign the most accomplished doctors to oversee the most complex medical cases, shouldn't we be making sure that the students and schools with the greatest need are taught and led by our most experienced and effective educators? And shouldn't schools, like businesses, acknowledge and reward good work? Sure, agree many teachers, parents, administrators, and policy makers. But the devil, as they say, is in the details.

In Florida, for example, teachers widely criticized a merit-pay plan approved by the state legislature in 2006 as unfair and divisive because it allowed for only one-quarter of all teachers to receive bonuses. The plan has since been revamped to include, among other things, compensation for teams of teachers who have a role in moving kids and schools forward.

"We've been down this road before," says Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford University's Charles E. Ducommon Professor of Education, noting that merit-pay plans were also introduced in the 1920s, the 1950s, and the 1980s. "We know that there are strategies and options that have some good potential, but there are also really predictable pitfalls to be aware of and design around," she cautions. The risk of failing to learn from past lessons is significant, Darling-Hammond adds, because poorly thought-out programs can cause teachers to become demoralized and even leave their districts, just what the programs are meant to prevent.

Still, many teachers applaud these efforts for developing holistic metrics for effective teaching and for including classroom teachers in all aspects of program development and implementation. Administrators, for their part, are finding these programs to be effective at encouraging experienced teachers to transfer to the most challenging schools.

The best incentive plans are those that go beyond rewarding select teachers whose students score higher on standardized tests, says Darling-Hammond; they use multiple measures to evaluate teacher performance and create career ladders capable of supporting and rewarding all teachers. "You don't just want to lift the boat of a few teachers," she advises. "The goal should be to improve the instructional enterprise in an entire school or district."

Roberta Furger is a contributing writer to Edutopia.

Discussion on Blogs

Digital Discussion: Take Your Class to the Internet

How to set up a blog in your classroom.

by Helena Echlin

published 9/7/2007

What's Next: Digital Discussion

Credit: Mystic Aquarium
This is a multipart article. Click here to go to the beginning.

Many teachers have started to experiment with blogs. For some, a blog is an electronic notebook -- one students can't lose (or claim the dog ate). For others, it's a forum where a class discussion can unfold 24/7. Either way, blogging can be a powerful educational tool. Suggestions for setting up a classroom blog follow. (Keep in mind that these ideas assume student access to computers and the Internet.)

Decide the Main Use for Your Blog

How you structure classroom blogs depends on their utility. Here are various approaches:

  • Classroom management: Use a blog to post assignments, handouts, and notices. You can also put up study notes and have students take turns summarizing what happened in school that day.
  • Learning journal: Patricia Harder, a seventh-grade teacher at Henley Middle School, in Crozet, Virginia, uses individual or small-group blogs as a place for students to "write reflectively" on what they learned from a particular assignment and how they might do better next time.
  • Online notebook: Limiting access to teacher and individual students only, you can use the blog as a way to track students' progress. Harder found using a blog this way particularly helpful when she suspected one of her students had a learning disability. "I went to the committee that evaluates students for learning disabilities and was able to present them with a record of the sentence structure my student had used," she explains.
  • Class discussion: Assign blogs to small groups, or set up a single blog for the whole class. You may post entries for discussion, or have individual students and guest bloggers post entries.
  • Personal expression: Give students individual blogs for posting whatever they want. This might seem like a recipe for disaster, but Konrad Glogowski, who teaches grades 7-9 at Fern Hill School, in Oakville, Ontario, Canada, and is the creator of the Blog of Proximal Development Web site, found this format to be a huge success. Inspired by an audience of their peers, his students posted poetry, journal entries, and reactions to articles they had read, as well as prolific comments on the blogs of fellow students.

Decide How to Grade Work

Use blogs to post homework for traditional evaluation."An assignment might be, 'After discussing a short story in class, post an entry on your blog, commenting either on the class discussion or the story itself,'" Glogowski says. Although he does not grade the personal entries, he adds, they "help me assess a student's engagement and effort, which I might mention when conferencing with parents."

Set Up Your Blog(s)

At one of the free blog-hosting sites, such as Blogger, setting up a blog takes only a few minutes. Just follow the instructions (create an account, and choose a name and template). If you want to limit accessibility, list the email addresses of those allowed to see it. However, some schools have blocks on Internet access, so you may want to subscribe to a service such as Edublogs or Class Blogmeister, which have additional features.

Protect Your Students

If your classroom blog is publicly accessible, make sure students use first names only and do not provide personal identifying details. You will also have to set clear guidelines on what is appropriate regarding content and comments.

Bring the Blog into the Classroom

When Glogowski's students began blogging, their enthusiasm delighted him. Then he realized that what they were writing had little to do with their curriculum. "The question was, how could I help them channel that energy into academic work?" he asks. His solution: Discuss the blogs in class so students could understand that the confidence and creativity they showed in their blogs had a place in the classroom, too.

Helena Echlin is a freelance writer in San Francisco.

Sample Blogging Lesson Plan

Following is a suggested lesson plan teacher Konrad Glogowski created for eighth-grade students on constructive blogging procedures.

Grade level: Eight
Subject: Language arts
Lesson title: "Writing Constructive Comments in a Blogging Community."

Objective: To help students identify the main characteristics of a constructive blog response and allow them to compose such responses.

Resources needed: Student comments (short and constructive) posted in the classroom blogging community.

Procedure: Inquiry approach, Socratic approach, class discussion The teacher will spark a discussion on blog responses by using specific, constructive, student-generated examples from the classroom blogging community. Using the Socratic method, the teacher will guide a discussion on what makes these comments helpful.

The teacher will also use short, congratulatory comments from the class blogosphere to initiate discussion about how these types of responses compare to other, more constructive, comments. The teacher will ask students who received mostly congratulatory comments to speak to the class about the effectiveness of these types of comments, and how this kind of feedback made them feel.

Checking for understanding, guided practice: The teacher will instruct the students to write a short response to any student entry posted online. Students will then choose an entry and compose their responses directly online or in their notebooks. The teacher will circulate the classroom to observe and guide students.

What do you think of this lesson plan? Your (constructive) comments would be greatly appreciated!

Edublogs We Love: Ten Top Stops for Internet Interaction

These Web sites are the cornerstones of a vast online educational community.

by Edutopia Staff

published 9/6/2007

This is a multipart article. Click here to go to the beginning.

It's seems everybody has a blog these days, including teachers and other people who are passionate about education. Here are some of the most popular sources of big and deep thoughts:

David Warlick's 2¢ Worth
What makes Warlick's 2¢ priceless is a mix of intense curiosity, refreshing enthusiasm, and photos that speak of a wry and observant personality.

Around the Corner v2
Miguel Guhlin's blog features the quote "Courage can't see around corners, but goes around them anyway." Look past its uninspiring interface, and you'll find just this kind of pithy talk.

Dangerously Irrelevant
In ongoing debates about education, the borderline-irrelevant topics often prove enlightening. The only danger is in not paying attention to them.

Joanne Jacobs
Jacobs practices a kind of free linking and free thinking that takes you from country to country and from religion to technology to health, all in the orbit of education.

Kathy Schrock's Kaffeeklatsch
The keyword in the name of this blog refers to an informal gathering to drink coffee and chat. As a Web barista, Schrock serves a compelling educational brew.

Leader Talk
Written by school leaders for school leaders, proof that those at the top are fighting for change, too.

Moving at the Speed of Creativity
Uses plain language to highlight exciting technology and innovation in education.

NYC Educator
It may be the Daily Show of education blogs, combining parody, retro images, and a skeptical sensibility in service of a true concern for our educational future.

PBS Teachers: Learning.Now
Checking out the well-crafted entries on this site is like a one-on-one with a patient mentor: lots of wisdom, few wasted words.

Weblogg-ed
As its snowy mountain logo implies, Will Richardson's weblogg-ed is a breath of fresh air. Without clutter, his entries can be meditated on in singular simplicity. (Full disclosure: He's on our advisory board. This blog reminds us why.)

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